Will the new head of the civil service be in a weakened position?

There's a real chance the top civil servant might not be a white male. But, whoever gets it, the job has been downgraded, says Jane Dudman

Britain's incoming prime minister David Cameron and his wife Samantha meet cabinet secretary Gus O'Donnell (right) after entering 10 Downing Street in May 2010. Some say the next head of the civil service is unlikely to be a white male. Photograph: Pool/Reuters

Following the resignation of cabinet secretary and head of the civil service Sir Gus O'Donnell, Whitehall permanent secretaries at their regular Wednesday morning meetings must now be eyeing one another as potential competitors for the new job as head of the home civil service. O'Donnell is due to go in December, and betting has opened among Whitehall watchers on the chances of this being the first time the top civil servant might not be a white male.

Sir Suma Chakrabarti, who runs the Ministry of Justice, is certainly a potential front runner. And with more women than ever before heading Whitehall departments, contenders could include: Lin Homer, who has been running the Department for Transport since last December and had a good track record at the Border Agency; Dame Helen Ghosh, who became the Home Office's first female permanent secretary last December; and Moira Wallace, who has run the Department of Energy and Climate Change since 2008.

Whoever wins will be powerful – but they will also be disappointed, because the job they will do has been significantly downgraded. For the first time since 1983, the head of the civil service will be a separate job from the post of cabinet secretary. Worse, the responsibility of running the civil service won't even be a separate post, but will be added on to the successful candidate's day job, running their own department.

Whoever wins the job will have to manage their peers from within the club – a tough task for any manager. Many feel that this makes the post more of an honorary position than a real management role and that political power will lie with O'Donnell's replacement as cabinet secretary Jeremy Heywood, the permanent secretary at No 10.

Such a split of responsibilities had been resisted by O'Donnell's predecessors, including Lord [Robin] Butler, cabinet secretary from 1988 to 1998, who believed that the power accruing from being in the thick of things at No 10 was an important aspect of the top civil service post.

Is it a coincidence that the job is being downgraded at the very moment it may go to a more diverse candidate? There are certainly those who feel that the change reflects a worrying trend within the government to downplay the role of civil servants. Senior civil servants are furious over attacks on their terms and conditions by the coalition government, and the union that represents them, the FDA, is even contemplating industrial action.

There are also fears that splitting the post could increase the political pressure on the civil service, which prides itself on its neutrality. The difficulty of maintaining that neutrality was vividly illustrated at the beginning of October, when Sir Peter Housden, the most senior civil servant in Scotland, ran into a furious row amid accusations that he had become too close to the Scottish National party government and its support for Scottish independence.

On that occasion, as on many others, O'Donnell was the arbiter of civil service independence, visiting Scotland to intervene in the row. The questions in future will be how much power a seriously weakened head of the civil service would have in a similar situation and whether this really is the right time to make the head of the civil service a part-time role, just as the civil service is dealing with unprecedented change.

Many fear that while there may be change at the top of the civil service, the ability of the successful candidate to deal with change across Whitehall may be seriously undermined, at a time when effective leadership is needed more than ever.